MatCha: Enhancing Visual Language Pretraining with Math Reasoning and Chart Derendering

Fangyu Liu, Francesco Piccinno, Syrine Krichene, Chenxi Pang, Kenton Lee, Mandar Joshi, Yasemin Altun, Nigel Collier, Julian Eisenschlos


Abstract
Visual language data such as plots, charts, and infographics are ubiquitous in the human world. However, state-of-the-art vision-language models do not perform well on these data. We propose MatCha (Math reasoning and Chart derendering pretraining) to enhance visual language models’ capabilities in jointly modeling charts/plots and language data. Specifically, we propose several pretraining tasks that cover plot deconstruction and numerical reasoning which are the key capabilities in visual language modeling. We perform the MatCha pretraining starting from Pix2Struct, a recently proposed image-to-text visual language model. On standard benchmarks such as PlotQA and ChartQA, the MatCha model outperforms state-of-the-art methods by as much as nearly 20%. We also examine how well MatCha pretraining transfers to domains such as screenshots, textbook diagrams, and document figures and observe overall improvement, verifying the usefulness of MatCha pretraining on broader visual language tasks.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.714
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
12756–12770
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.714
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.714
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Fangyu Liu, Francesco Piccinno, Syrine Krichene, Chenxi Pang, Kenton Lee, Mandar Joshi, Yasemin Altun, Nigel Collier, and Julian Eisenschlos. 2023. MatCha: Enhancing Visual Language Pretraining with Math Reasoning and Chart Derendering. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 12756–12770, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MatCha: Enhancing Visual Language Pretraining with Math Reasoning and Chart Derendering (Liu et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.714.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.714.mp4